List of Attacks

Rape and Adultery

Why are rape victims often punished by Islamic courts as adulterers?

Under Islamic law, rape can only be proven if the rapist confesses or if
there are four male witnesses. Women who allege rape without the benefit
of the act having been witnessed by four men (who presumably develop a
conscience afterwards) are actually confessing to having sex. If they or the accused
happens to be married, then it is considered to be adultery.

Quran

Quran (2:282)
- Establishes that a woman's testimony is worth only half that of a man's in
court (there is no "he said/she said" gridlock in Islam).

Quran (24:4)
- "And those who accuse free women then do not bring four witnesses, flog them..." Strictly speaking, this verse addresses
adultery (revealed at the very time that Muhammad's favorite wife was being
accused of adultery on the basis of only three witnesses coincidentally enough).
However it is a part of the theological underpinning of the Sharia rule
on rape, since strict Islamic law does not recognize rape if there are not four male witnesses or a confession.

Quran (24:13)
- "Why did they not bring four witnesses of it? But as they have not brought
witnesses they are liars before Allah."

Quran (2:223)
- "Your wives are as a tilth unto you; so approach your tilth when or how ye
will..." There is no such thing as rape in marriage, as a man is
permitted unrestricted sexual access to his wives.

Hadith and Sira

Sahih Bukhari (5:59:462) - The background for the Quranic requirement of four
witnesses to adultery. Muhammad's favorite wife, Aisha, was accused of
cheating [on her polygamous husband]. Three witnesses corroborated the
event, but Muhammad apparently did not want to believe it, and so established the arbitrary
rule that four witnesses are required.

Notes

Rape of Muslim women is against Islamic law - although the
rape of non-Muslim women is not, if they are 'captured in battle' or bought as
slaves. Technically, a Muslim woman can be raped if she is a slave who converted to Islam after her capture.

Even the rape of a free Muslim woman is almost impossible to prove under strict Islamic law
(Sharia). If the man claims that the
act was consensual sex, there is little that the woman can do to refute
this. Islam places the burden of avoiding sexual encounters of any sort on
the woman and her male guardians.

A recent fatwa from a mainstream Islamic site echoes this
rule and even chides a victim of incest for complaining when she has no "evidence":

However, it is not permissible to
accuse the father of rape without
evidence. Indeed, the Sharee’ah put some
special conditions for proving Zina
(fornication or adultery) that are not
required in case of other crimes. The
crime of Zina is not confirmed except if
the fornicator admits it, or with the
testimony of four trustworthy men, while
the testimony of women is not accepted.

Hence, the statement of this girl or
the statement of her mother in itself
does not Islamically prove anything
against the father, especially that the
latter denies it.

Therefore, if this daughter has no
evidence to prove that her accusations
are true, she should not have claimed
that she was raped by her father and she
should not have taken him to the court.
(IslamWeb.net,
Image)

Since it is incredibly unlikely that a child molester will
violate his victim in front of "four trustworthy men", strict Sharia amounts to a
free pass for sexual predators.

Islamic law rejects forensic evidence such as DNA in
favor of testimony. An interesting situation thus sometimes develops in
cases where a victim alleges rape but the man denies that sex even took place.
In the absence of four male witnesses, rape cannot be proven. The woman's
testimony then becomes a "confession" of adultery. She can even be stoned, even
though the male is unpunished since he never admitted to a sexual act.

Some clerics blame rape on the woman. Australian
Sheik Feiz
recently said a rape victim "has no one to blame but herself. She
displayed her beauty to the entire world... to tease man and appeal to his
carnal nature." Even his successor, who was brought in to
mitigate the backlash,
compared unveiled women to "sweet pastries," tempting 'hungry' men.

One of the world's most respected Sunni scholars, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi,
told an audience on his al-Jazeera television show in 2004 that "to be absolved from
guilt, the raped woman must have shown some sort of good conduct."

Dr.
Abd al-Aziz Fawazan al-Fawzan, a professor of Islamic law said that "if a woman gets raped walking in public alone, then she, herself is at fault. She is only seducing men by her presence. She should have stayed at home like a Muslim woman."

This was echoed by the imam of a Salafist mosque in Cologne, Germany in the wake of the shocking sex abuse rampage by recently arrived Muslims on New Year's Eve in 2015. He explained that "the events" (which included rape) "were the girls' own fault because they were half-naked and wearing perfume."

A Saudi cleric, in 2017, also put the blame for both rape and sexual harassment squarely on the woman, and added that
"a woman who leaves her house wearing make-up and perfume is an adulteress."

When it came to light in 2016 that a 13-year-old British girl had been abused by a dozen Pakistani rapists, certain members of the Muslim community said they believed the victim "played her part."

There can also be no such thing as rape in a Muslim marriage, even if the
husband hits the wife in order to bring about her submission. Another
recent fatwa reminds a woman, she "does not have the right to refuse her
husband, rather she must respond to his request every time he calls her."
(Islam Q&A, Fatwa No. 33597).

Keep in mind that most Muslim countries do not
operate under strict Islamic law, but rather under legal codes copied from the
West. Therefore rape victims in these countries can - and often do - receive
justice under more reasonable standards of proof.